VIMS team among DOD honorees

Field samplingA DCERP research team conducts a field experiment in the New River estuary as part of the DCERP project. From L: Carolyn Currin (NOAA), Iris Anderson and Daniel Maxey of VIMS, and John Wernly (NOAA).
Image courtesy of VIMS

Field work on a marine baseThe researchers sometimes encountered military vehicles while conducting their DCERP research on Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune.
Photo by Iris Anderson

Water samplingVIMS marine scientists Jen Stanhope and Hunter Walker collect water samples during a field experiment in the New River estuary as part of the DCERP project.
Photo by Iris Anderson

Professors Iris Anderson
and Mark Brush of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science are part of a team that has received one of
six “Project of the Year” awards from the U.S. Department of Defense for its
contributions to a long-term effort to conserve and protect the natural
resources of Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

The Department of Defense’s
Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program describes the project—honored
in the Resource Conservation and Climate Change category—as “an unprecedented, multi-year
interdisciplinary ecological research program” that “is helping DoD manage its
coastal installations in more effective and sustainable ways.”

Anderson, who co-leads the
project’s Aquatic/Estuarine component, says the goal of DCERP is “to develop
ecosystem-based management tools that will allow the military to continue to
use Camp Lejeune for training for decades to come, and to sustain the health of
the New River estuary along which the base sits.”

Base personnel will use the
management tools to sustainably manage the area’s coastal ecosystem in the face
of increasing temperatures, storminess, sea-level rise, and nutrient pollution,
thus providing continued access for training while also fulfilling the
military’s adherence to the Clean Water Act.

The 243 square-mile base
includes the New River estuary, undeveloped barrier islands, upland forests,
and coastal marshes, along with dozens of tactical landing zones, more than 30
gun positions, 80 live-fire ranges, and about 11 miles of beaches that are used
to support amphibious operations.

Fieldwork and modeling

Research by Anderson, Brush,
and several of their technicians and graduate students uses state-of-the-art measurement and
modeling techniques to determine the source and fate of nitrogen, carbon, and other
nutrients within Camp Lejeune’s coastal ecosystem, and to investigate how
nutrient enrichment affects water quality and food webs in the New River
estuary.

The VIMS researchers collaborate
on the project with private companies including RTI, Atmospheric
Research and Analysis, and Porter Scientific; colleagues at 7
universities in Connecticut, North and South Carolina, and Virginia; and
scientists in 3
federal agencies.

The team gathers data both from
the New River watershed—land cover, land use, and stream flow, for instance—and
from the water, including water clarity, levels of chlorophyll and dissolved
oxygen, and concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorous. Brush and colleagues
help collect the data, then feed them into computer models to help quantify and
predict the source and impact of the nutrients.

“Watershed modeling is an
important tool for quantifying the inputs of fresh water, sediments, and
nutrients into the estuary,” says Brush, “They help us predict how the estuary
will respond to potential changes in these inputs from shifts in land use and climate.”

A resilient yet vulnerable estuary

Anderson says the project’s
main finding to date “is that activities on the base have very little impact on
water quality. The major source of nutrients is from agricultural operations upstream
in the New River watershed.”

She notes that water
quality in the New River estuary is still relatively good despite these inputs,
likely because the estuary’s shallow waters provide resiliency by encouraging
the growth of marine microbes that can remove nutrients from the system.

“More than half the estuary
is less than 6-feet deep,” says Anderson. “That allows the benthos to play an
important role in mitigating the effects of nutrient enrichment, because light
can reach the bottom to fuel photosynthesis and increase the uptake of nitrogen
and phosphorous by microbes and the larger animals that feed on them. It’s what we call
the benthic filter.”

The research team cautions,
however, that the health of the New River estuary is vulnerable to the
increased storm run-off and water temperatures that climate models predict for
the mid-Atlantic region, while Camp Lejeune’s barrier islands and dunes are
threatened by rising seas.

“The efficiency of the
benthic filter is greatly susceptible to storm activity and increased stream
flow,” says Anderson. “More freshwater input reduces light availability to the
bottom, because streams in this area have a lot of what we call CDOM—colored,
dissolved organic matter—that’s what makes the water tea-colored. We’re
concerned that the estuary’s vulnerability to nutrient enrichment will increase
in the future, as storm activity increases due to climate change.”

In recognizing the DCERP
team with its “Project of the Year” award, the DoD notes “All parts of the base
ecosystem are connected, affecting each other in myriad ways. In turn,
environmental changes can affect training over the long term. DCERP serves as a
model for ecological research management by bringing together participants from
multiple institutions and disciplines to work for several years at the
landscape scale and to ensure the research is linked to practical management
questions at coastal installations. Training at Camp Lejeune can happen only if
its unique beach, sand dune, and marsh features can be sustained year after
year.”

Anderson, Brush, and their
colleagues were recently part of a new contract—again led by RTI International—that extends DCERP by 5 years. The new
project focuses on carbon cycling and how climate change will affect the base, with
a goal of providing ecosystem models for use as decision-support tools.

ESTCP Project of the Year

Modified Biopolymers as an Alternative to Petroleum-Based Polymers for Soil Modification
Steven Larson, U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development
Center—Environmental Laboratory; J. Kent Newman, U.S. Army Engineer
Research and Development Center—Geotechnical and Structures Laboratory;
Gregory O'Connor, U.S. Army, PM-Joint Services ; Gary Nijak, Jr., ETS
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